Nottinghamshire booked a place at their own finals day party last night, posting their record score in Twenty20 cricket in their first quarter-final and before the biggest Trent Bridge crowd for a county match.

More than 12,000 saw David Hussey and Samit Patel settle the game in 56 balls, putting on 121 for the third Notts wicket. Unfortunately after that everything was an anticlimax, apart from Lance Klusener hitting five sixes in his own personal rearguard action.

Things got away from Northampton almost from the start when Stephen Flemming tucked into the normally frugal Sourav Ganguly, greeting the former Indian captain with two sixes in his first over and a third off the first ball of his second before holing out for 39 off 28 balls.

However any Northampton hopes of pulling the scoring rate back vanished when Hussey joined Samit Patel who had eased himself into the game by chipping Klusener over the square leg boundary for the first of his four sixes. Ganguly was withdrawn from the attack - three overs for 39 - but Hussey, who took a while coming to terms with Twenty20, then turned his attention to Jason Brown, putting the spinner into the top tier of the Radcliffe Road stand.

Three consecutive overs - two from Brown and one from Andrew White - went for 60 as Hussey and Patel each shot passed their half centuries in 27 balls. By the time Hussey departed, bowled by Klusener, he and Patel had taken the score from 60 for two to 181 for three. Patel ran himself out two overs later having scored 65 off 38 deliveries - four more than Hussey needed for his 71. Four of the Northampton bowlers finished with economy rates in double figures.